The Moz Blog

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2014)

It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we've grown the Moz blog to nearly a million visits each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and given that we seem to have stumbled on some of that knowledge, I felt it compulsory to give back by sharing what we've observed.

NOTE: This post replaces a popular one I wrote on the same topic in 2007 (and updated again in 2012). This post is intended to be useful to all forms of bloggers - independent folks, those seeking to monetize, and marketing professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies. Not all of the tactics will work for everyone, but at least some of these should be applicable and useful.

#1 - Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share

When strategizing about who you're writing for, consider that audience's ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web. For example, great infographics that strike a chord (
like this one), beautiful videos that tell a story (like this one) and remarkable collections of facts that challenge common assumptions (like this one) are all targeted at audiences likely to share (geeks with facial hair, those interested in weight loss and those with political thoughts about macroeconomics respectively).

If you can identify groups that have high concentrations of the blue and orange circles in the diagram above, you dramatically improve the chances of reaching larger audiences and growing your traffic numbers. Targeting blog content at less-share-likely groups may not be a terrible decision (particularly if that's where you passion or your target audience lies), but it will decrease the propensity for your blog's work to spread like wildfire across the web.

Advertisers on Madison Avenue have spent billions researching and determining where consumers with various characteristics gather and what they spend their time doing so they can better target their messages. They do it because reaching a group of 65+ year old women with commercials for extreme sports equipment is known to be a waste of money, while reaching an 18-30 year old male demographic that attends rock-climbing gyms is likely to have a much higher ROI.

Thankfully, you don't need to spend a dime to figure out where a large portion of your audience can be found on the web. In fact, you probably already know a few blogs, forums, websites and social media communities where discussions and content are being posted on your topic (and if you don't a Google search will take you much of the way). From that list, you can do some easy expansion using a
web-based tool like Google's Display Planner:

Once you've determined the communities where your soon-to-be-readers gather, you can start participating. Create an account, read what others have written and don't jump in the conversation until you've got a good feel for what's appropriate and what's not. I've
written a post here about rules for comment marketing, and all of them apply. Be a good web citizen and you'll be rewarded with traffic, trust and fans. Link-drop, spam or troll and you'll get a quick boot, or worse, a reputation as a blogger no one wants to associate with.

#3 - Make Your Blog's Content SEO-Friendly

Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems. As I've written before, "
SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing." In 2014, Google will see over 6 billion daily searches from around the world, and that number is only growing:

Taking advantage of this massive traffic opportunity is of tremendous value to bloggers, who often find that much of the business side of blogging, from inquiries for advertising to guest posting opportunities to press and discovery by major media entities comes via search.

SEO for blogs is both simple and easy to set up, particularly if you're using an SEO-friendly platform like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. For more information on how to execute on great SEO for blogs, check out the following resources:

Don't let bad press or poor experiences with spammers (spam is not SEO) taint the amazing power and valuable contributions SEO can make to your blog's traffic and overall success. 20% of the effort and tactics to make your content optimized for search engines will yield 80% of the value possible; embrace it and thousands of visitors seeking exactly what you've posted will be the reward.

Twitter has 271 million active users every month. Facebook has over 1 billion active users. Google+ has over 300 million. LinkedIn is over 300 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world, and those that participate on these services fit into the "content distributors" description above, meaning they're likely to help spread the word about your blog.

Leveraging these networks to attract traffic requires patience, study, attention to changes by the social sites and consideration in what content to share and how to do it. My advice is to use the following process:

Fill out each of those profiles to the fullest possible extent - use photos, write compelling descriptions and make each one as useful and credible as possible. Research shows that profiles with more information have a significant correlation with more successful accounts (and there's a lot of common sense here, too, given that spammy profiles frequently feature little to no profile work).

Connect with users on those sites with whom you already share a personal or professional relationships, and start following industry luminaries, influencers and connectors. Services like FollowerWonk and CircleCount can be incredible for this:

Start sharing content - your own blog posts, those of peers in your industry who've impressed you and anything that you feel has a chance to go "viral" and earn sharing from others.

Interact with the community - use hash tags, searches and those you follow to find interesting conversations and content and jump in! Social networks are amazing environment for building a brand, familiarizing yourself with a topic and the people around it, and earning the trust of others through high quality, authentic participation and sharing

If you consistently employ a strategy of participation, share great stuff and make a positive, memorable impression on those who see your interactions on these sites, your followers and fans will grow and your ability to drive traffic back to your blog by sharing content will be tremendous. For many bloggers, social media is the single largest source of traffic, particularly in the early months after launch, when SEO is a less consistent driver.

#5 - Install Analytics and Pay Attention to the Results

At the very least, I'd recommend most bloggers install
Google Analytics (which is free), and watch to see where visits originate, which sources drive quality traffic and what others might be saying about you and your content when they link over. If you want to get more advanced, check out this post on 18 Steps to Successful Metrics and Marketing.

As you can see, there's all sorts of great insights to be gleaned by looking at where visits originate, analyzing how they were earned and trying to repeat the successes, focus on the high quality and high traffic sources and put less effort into marketing paths that may not be effective. In this example, it's pretty clear that Facebook and Twitter are both excellent channels. StumbleUpon sends a lot of traffic, but they don't stay very long (averaging only 36 seconds vs. the general average of 4 minutes!).

Employing analytics is critical to knowing where you're succeeding, and where you have more opportunity. Don't ignore it, or you'll be doomed to never learn from mistakes or execute on potential.

If you're someone who can produce graphics, take photos, illustrate or even just create funny doodles in MS Paint, you should leverage that talent on your blog. By uploading and hosting images (or using a third-party service like
Flickr or Niice to embed your images with licensing requirements on that site), you create another traffic source for yourself via Image Search, and often massively improve the engagement and enjoyment of your visitors.

When using images, I highly recommend creating a way for others to use them on their own sites legally and with permission, but in such a way that benefits you as the content creator. For example, you could have a consistent notice under your images indicating that re-using is fine, but that those who do should link back to this post. You can also post that as a sidebar link, include it in your terms of use, or note it however you think will get the most adoption.

Some people will use your images without linking back, which sucks. However, you can find them by employing the
Image Search function of "similar images," shown below:

Clicking the "similar" link on any given image will show you other images that Google thinks look alike, which can often uncover new sources of traffic. Just reach out and ask if you can get a link, nicely. Much of the time, you'll not only get your link, but make a valuable contact or new friend, too!

#7 - Conduct Keyword Research While Writing Your Posts

Not surprisingly, a big part of showing up in search engines is targeting the terms and phrases your audience are actually typing into a search engine. It's hard to know what these words will be unless you do some research, and luckily, there's a free tool from Google to help called the
AdWords Keyword Planner.

Type some words at the top, hit search and AdWords will show you phrases that match the intent and/or terms you've employed. There's lots to play around with here, but watch out in particular for the keyword filters, keyword options, and include/exclude features:

When you choose "exact match" AdWords will show you only the quantity of searches estimated for that precise phrase. If you use broad match, they'll include any search phrases that use related/similar words in a pattern they think could have overlap with your keyword intent (which can get pretty darn broad). "Phrase match" will give you only those phrases that include the word or words in your search - still fairly wide-ranging, but between "exact" and "broad."

I also use and recommend Keywordtool.io, which mines keywords from Google's Suggest function:

When you're writing a blog post, keyword research is best utilized for the title and headline of the post. For example, if I wanted to write a post here on Moz about how to generate good ideas for bloggers, I might craft something that uses the phrase "blog post ideas" or "blogging ideas" near the front of my title and headline, as in "Blog Post Ideas for When You're Truly Stuck," or "Blogging Ideas that Will Help You Clear Writer's Block."

Optimizing a post to target a specific keyword isn't nearly as hard as it sounds. 80% of the value comes from merely using the phrase effectively in the title of the blog post, and writing high quality content about the subject. If you're interested in more, read
Perfecting Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization.

#8 - Frequently Reference Your Own Posts and Those of Others

The web was not made for static, text-only content! Readers appreciate links, as do other bloggers, site owners and even search engines. When you reference your own material in-context and in a way that's not manipulative (watch out for over-optimizing by linking to a category, post or page every time a phrase is used - this is almost certainly discounted by search engines and looks terrible to those who want to read your posts), you potentially draw visitors to your other content AND give search engines a nice signal about those previous posts.

Perhaps even more valuable is referencing the content of others. The biblical expression "give and ye shall receive," perfectly applies on the web. Other site owners will often receive
Google Alerts (or, if they're using Moz, they might get Fresh Alerts :-) ) or look through their incoming referrers (as I showed above in tip #5) to see who's talking about them and what they're saying. Linking out is a direct line to earning links, social mentions, friendly emails and new relationships with those you reference. In its early days, this tactic was one of the best ways we earned recognition and traffic with the Moz blog and the power continues to this day.

The major social networking sites aren't alone in their power to send traffic to a blog. Social community sites like
Reddit (which now receives more than 2 billion! with a "B"! views each month), StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Tumblr, Care2 (for nonprofits and causes), GoodReads (books), Ravelry (knitting), Newsvine (news/politics) and many, many more (Wikipedia maintains a decent, though not comprehensive list here).

Each of these sites have different rules, formats and ways of participating and sharing content. As with participation in blog or forum communities described above in tactic #2, you need to add value to these communities to see value back. Simply drive-by spamming or leaving your link won't get you very far, and could even cause a backlash. Instead, learn the ropes, engage authentically and you'll find that fans, links and traffic can develop.

These communities are also excellent sources of inspiration for posts on your blog. By observing what performs well and earns recognition, you can tailor your content to meet those guidelines and reap the rewards in visits and awareness. My top recommendation for most bloggers is to at least check whether there's an appropriate subreddit in which you should be participating.
Subreddits and their search function can help with that.

#10 - Guest Blog (and Accept the Guest Posts of Others)

When you're first starting out, it can be tough to convince other bloggers to allow you to post on their sites OR have an audience large enough to inspire others to want to contribute to your site. This is when friends and professional connections are critical. When you don't have a compelling marketing message, leverage your relationships - find the folks who know you, like you and trust you and ask those who have blog to let you take a shot at authoring something, then ask them to return the favor.

Guest blogging is a fantastic way to spread your brand to new folks who've never seen your work before, and it can be useful in earning early links and references back to your site, which will drive direct traffic and help your search rankings (diverse, external links are a key part of
how search engines rank sites and pages). Several recommendations for those who engage in guest blogging:

Find sites that have a relevant audience - it sucks to pour your time into writing a post, only to see it fizzle because the readers weren't interested. Spend a bit more time researching the posts that succeed on your target site, the makeup of the audience, what types of comments they leave and you'll earn a much higher return with each post.

Don't be discouraged if you ask and get a "no" or a "no response." As your profile grows in your niche, you'll have more opportunities, requests and an easier time getting a "yes," so don't take early rejections too hard and watch out - in many marketing practices, persistence pays, but pestering a blogger to write for them is not one of these (and may get your email address permanently banned from their inbox).

When pitching your guest post make it as easy as possible for the other party. When requesting to post, have a phenomenal piece of writing all set to publish that's never been shared before and give them the ability to read it. These requests get far more "yes" replies than asking for the chance to write with no evidence of what you'll contribute. At the very least, make an outline and write a title + snippet.

Likewise, when requesting a contribution, especially from someone with a significant industry profile, asking for a very specific piece of writing is much easier than getting them to write an entire piece from scratch of their own design. You should also present statistics that highlight the value of posting on your site - traffic data, social followers, RSS subscribers, etc. can all be very persuasie to a skeptical writer.

Be aware that Google's recently crackeddown on guest blog posts and guest blog tools that focus exclusively on attracting links. While links can be a nice byproduct of a relevant, useful, and high quality contribution to another site, it can look very fishy to Google if all your links are coming from guest contributions that appear to have little relevance and low quality. Moz's Jen Lopez wrote an excellent summation of the new rules for guest posting here.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are also great places to find guest blogging opportunities. In particular, check out the profiles of those you're connected with to see if they run blogs of their own that might be a good fit.
Google's Blog Search function and services like BuzzSumo or Fresh Web Explorer are also solid tools for discovery.

#11 - Incorporate Great Design Into Your Site

The power of beautiful, usable, professional design can't be overstated. When readers look at a blog, the first thing they judge is how it "feels" from a design and UX perspective. Sites that use default templates or have horrifying, 1990's design will receive less trust, a lower time-on-page, fewer pages per visit and a lower likelihood of being shared. Those that feature stunning design that clearly indicates quality work will experience the reverse - and reap amazing benefits.

Sortfolio - an awesome tool to ID designers by region, skill and budget

99 Designs - a controversial site that provides designs on spec via contests (I have mixed feelings on this one, but many people find it useful, particularly for budget-conscious projects)

This is one area where budgeting a couple thousand dollars (if you can afford it) or even a few hundred (if you're low on cash) can make a big difference in the traffic, sharing and viral-impact of every post you write.

#12 - Interact on Other Blogs' Comments

As bloggers, we see a lot of comments. Many are spam, only a few add real value, and even fewer are truly fascinating and remarkable. If you can be in this final category consistently, in ways that make a blogger sit up and think "man, I wish that person commented here more often!" you can achieve great things for your own site's visibility through participation in the comments of other blogs.

Combine the tools presented in #10 (particularly FWE) and #4 (especially FollowerWonk) for discovery. The feed subscriber counts in Google Reader can be particularly helpful for identifying good blogs for participation. Then apply the principles covered in this post on comment marketing.

Do be conscious of the name you use when commenting and the URL(s) you point back to. Consistency matters, particularly on naming, and linking to internal pages or using a name that's clearly made for keyword-spamming rather than true conversation will kill your efforts before they begin.

The best strategy I've seen for engaging on Q+A sites isn't to answer every question that comes along, but rather, to strategically provide high value to a Q+A community by engaging in those places where:

The question quality is high, and responses thus far have been thin

The question receives high visibility (either by ranking well for search queries, being featured on the site or getting social traffic/referrals). Most of the Q+A sites will show some stats around the traffic of a question

The question is something you can answer in a way that provides remarkable value to anyone who's curious and drops by

I also find great value in answering a few questions in-depth by producing an actual blog post to tackle them, then linking back. This is also a way I personally find blog post topics - if people are interested in the answer on a Q+A site, chances are good that lots of folks would want to read it on my blog, too!

Just be authentic in your answer, particularly if you're linking. If you'd like to see some examples, I
answer a lot of questions at Quora, frequently include relevant links, but am rarely accused of spamming or link dropping because it's clearly about providing relevant value, not just getting a link for SEO (links on most user-contributed sites are "nofollow" anyway, meaning they shouldn't pass search-engine value). There's a dangerous line to walk here, but if you do so with tact and candor, you can earn a great audience from your participation.

#14 - Enable Subscriptions via Feed + Email (and track them!)

If someone drops by your site, has a good experience and thinks "I should come back here and check this out again when they have more posts," chances are pretty high (I'd estimate 90%+) that you'll never see them again. That sucks! It shouldn't be the case, but we have busy lives and the Internet's filled with animated gifs of cats.

In order to pull back some of these would-be fans, I highly recommend creating an
RSS feed using Feedburner and putting visible buttons on the sidebar, top or bottom of your blog posts encouraging those who enjoy your content to sign up (either via feed, or via email, both of which are popular options).

Once you've set things up, visit every few weeks and check on your subscribers - are they clicking on posts? If so, which ones? Learning what plays well for those who subscribe to your content can help make you a better blogger, and earn more visits from RSS, too.

#15 - Attend and Host Events

Despite the immense power of the web to connect us all regardless of geography, in-person meetings are still remarkably useful for bloggers seeking to grow their traffic and influence. The people you meet and connect with in real-world settings are far more likely to naturally lead to discussions about your blog and ways you can help each other. This yields guest posts, links, tweets, shares, blogroll inclusion and general business development like nothing else.

I'm a big advocate of
Lanyrd, an event directory service that connects with your social networks to see who among your contacts will be at which events in which geographies. This can be phenomenally useful for identifying which meetups, conferences or gatherings are worth attending (and who you can carpool with).

#16 - Use Your Email Connections (and Signature) to Promote Your Blog

As a blogger, you're likely to be sending a lot of email out to others who use the web and have the power to help spread your work. Make sure you're not ignoring email as a channel, one-to-one though it may be. When given an opportunity in a conversation that's relevant, feel free to bring up your blog, a specific post or a topic you've written about. I find myself using blogging as a way to scalably answer questions - if I receive the same question many times, I'll try to make a blog post that answers it so I can simply link to that in the future.

I also like to use my email signature to promote the content I share online. If I was really sharp, I'd do link tracking using a service like Bit.ly so I could see how many clicks email footers really earn. I suspect it's not high, but it's also not 0.

#17 - Survey Your Readers

Web surveys are easy to run and often produce high engagement and great topics for conversation. If there's a subject or discussion that's particularly contested, or where you suspect showing the distribution of beliefs, usage or opinions can be revealing, check out a tool like
SurveyMonkey (they have a small free version) or PollDaddy. Google Docs also offers a survey tool that's totally free, but not yet great in my view.

#18 - Add Value to a Popular Conversation

Numerous niches in the blogosphere have a few "big sites" where key issues arise, get discussed and spawn conversations on other blogs and sites. Getting into the fray can be a great way to present your point-of-view, earn attention from those interested in the discussion and potentially get links and traffic from the industry leaders as part of the process.

#19 - Aggregate the Best of Your Niche

Bloggers, publishers and site owners of every variety in the web world love and hate to be compared and ranked against one another. It incites endless intrigue, discussion, methodology arguments and competitive behavior - but, it's amazing for earning attention. When a blogger publishes a list of "the best X" or "the top X" in their field, most everyone who's ranked highly praises the list, shares it and links to it. Here's an example from the world of marketing itself:

That's a screenshot of the
AdAge Power 150, a list that's been maintained for years in the marketing world and receives an endless amount of discussion by those listed (and not listed). For example, why is SEOmoz's Twitter score only a "13" when we have so many more followers, interactions and retweets than many of those with higher scores? Who knows. But I know it's good for AdAge. :-)

Now, obviously, I would encourage anyone building something like this to be as transparent, accurate and authentic as possible. A high quality resource that lists a "best and brightest" in your niche - be they blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, individual posts, people, conferences or whatever else you can think to rank - is an excellent piece of content for earning traffic and becoming a known quantity in your field.

Oh, and once you do produce it - make sure to let those featured know they've been listed. Tweeting at them with a link is a good way to do this, but if you have email addresses, by all means, reach out. It can often be the start of a great relationship!

#20 - Connect Your Web Profiles and Content to Your Blog

Many of you likely have profiles on services like YouTube, Slideshare, Yahoo!, DeviantArt and dozens of other social and Web 1.0 sites. You might be uploading content to Flickr, to Facebook, to Picasa or even something more esoteric like Prezi. Whatever you're producing on the web and wherever you're doing it, tie it back to your blog.

Including your blog's link on your actual profile pages is among the most obvious, but it's also incredibly valuable. On any service where interaction takes place, those interested in who you are and what you have to share will follow those links, and if they lead back to your blog, they become opportunities for capturing a loyal visitor or earning a share (or both!). But don't just do this with profiles - do it with content, too! If you've created a video for YouTube, make your blog's URL appear at the start or end of the video. Include it in the description of the video and on the uploading profile's page. If you're sharing photos on any of the dozens of photo services, use a watermark or even just some text with your domain name so interested users can find you.

If you're having trouble finding and updating all those old profiles (or figuring out where you might want to create/share some new ones),
KnowEm is a great tool for discovering your own profiles (by searching for your name or pseudonyms you've used) and claiming profiles on sites you may not yet have participated in.

#21 - Uncover the Links of Your Fellow Bloggers (and Nab 'em!)

If other blogs in your niche have earned references from sites around the web, there's a decent chance that they'll link to you as well. Conducting competitive link research can also show you what content from your competition has performed well and the strategies they may be using to market their work. To uncover these links, you'll need to use some tools.

OpenSiteExplorer is my favorite, but I'm biased (it's made by Moz). However, it is free to use - if you create a registered account here, you can get unlimited use of the tool showing up to 1,000 links per page or site in perpetuity.

There are other good tools for link research as well, including Majestic, Ahrefs and, I've heard that in the near-future, SearchMetrics.

Finding a link is great, but it's through the exhaustive research of looking through dozens or hundreds that you can identify patterns and strategies. You're also likely to find a lot of guest blogging opportunities and other chances for outreach. If you maintain a great persona and brand in your niche, your ability to earn these will rise dramatically.

Bonus #22 - Be Consistent and Don't Give Up

If there's one piece of advice I wish I could share with every blogger, it's this:

The above image comes from
Everywhereist's analytics. Geraldine could have given up 18 months into her daily blogging. After all, she was putting in 3-5 hours each day writing content, taking photos, visiting sites, coming up with topics, trying to guest blog and grow her Twitter followers and never doing any SEO (don't ask, it's a running joke between us). And then, almost two years after her blog began, and more than 500 posts in, things finally got going. She got some nice guest blogging gigs, had some posts of hers go "hot" in the social sphere, earned mentions on some bigger sites, then got really big press from Time's Best Blogs of 2011.

I'd guess there's hundreds of new bloggers on the web each day who have all the opportunity Geraldine had, but after months (maybe only weeks) of slogging away, they give up.

When I started the Moz blog in 2004, I had some advantages (mostly a good deal of marketing and SEO knowledge), but it was nearly 2 years before the blog could be called anything like a success. Earning traffic isn't rocket science, but it does take time, perseverance and consistency. Don't give up. Stick to your schedule. Remember that everyone has a few posts that suck, and it's only by writing and publishing those sucky posts that you get into the habit necessary to eventually transform your blog into something remarkable.

Good luck and good blogging from all of us at Moz!

Feel free to copy and re-post this content or the graphics, but please do link back (or reference Moz if using the images offline). Thanks!

326 Comments

Rand this is epic! Thanks for staying up all night to write it too, that is dedication :)

I really like point number 18 about adding value to conversations, and find that starting a debate on industry problems can be a serious traffic driver. Better still if you can spot something in the industry that is wrong which no one is talking about and focus on it, then it's a great way to get traffic and a ton of links as other places continue the debate.

It's all about finding the elephant in the room and shouting "LOOK EVERYONE!"

Every industry has one:

Online has SOPA

eBook publishers are fighting against spam

Food industries are fighting against rising costs

Technology industries face distribution challenges

Financial industries face... well what don't they face

---

Being the shining blog that fights for a common cause in your niche is a great tactic and even boring niches have some problems they can talk about. It's a great way to ... HEY IS THAT AN ELEPHANT?

I just came across with this post and found it very informative. In fact my all queries got answered in your post. Good work! You can also check out SocialAppsHQ's blogs to get more useful insights on Social media marketing here -http://socialappshq.wordpress.com

The Bonus point #22 is much more heavier than any of the other posts that you have in the blog post. All points are amazing and worth appreciation but without staying consistent none of them is useful. You really are amazing when it comes to SEO guidance... Add me to list of those impressed by Rand Fishkin... ;)

Hi Rand, Some great tips, I do them all but reading the list makes me think I need to pick up my game and enhance several of the list.

Another thing I want to add to the list is to make posts which spark debate, people will promote the post on itself.

Another thing with the guest blog posts a cool thing not many people do is try and find forums which have sections for articles which some times post them on the home page of the forum, build up reputation on the forum and then do a guest forum post another way to gather traffic.

Quick tip - When you share content from your site, be smart about it. Use the su.pr URL shortener so when people click on the links, they see the StumbleUpon version of the page (S.U. is the #1 driver of traffic across all social sites). When they see this, they're much more likelie to thumb it up, which means more free traffic for you!

The most important two things about this post is engagement and consistancy. Without the two there's no drive to keep the blog going. Taking a step back it's important to set the blogs objectives, goals & KPI's so that it can be easier to assign your content target audience.

I'd like to make you note how since 2006 Rand was warmly suggesting us to "Build a Brand" with our blogs, which is surely even more important right now.

If I may, I would add a 22th point, as I have not seen it reflected here: build a content strategy plan and schedule.

This is extremely important and, for businesses blog, you can also plan with anticipations some topic (i.e.: industry events related post before the events themselves, as could be "Waiting the CES 2013, rediscover what heppen last year"...).

In the content strategy plan take into account the prior keyword search you have done, and those topic macro-categories you have discovered thanks to it, make them your blog categories. And, after that, schedule in order to have always a minimum of two/three new post per months for any category.

This last tip of mine is obviously related to the "schedule" hot topic, something about I, Mike IPullRank King, John Dohertyf and others were talking about on Twitter yesterday. Personally, in the case of my blog (not of my clients) I post quite rarely: honestly I've not the time... but also I feel that it could be more dangerous than useful for me to write just for writing adding noise to the blogosphere. Instead I prefer to post something when I really know I can add something of value.

What I mean with that? I mean to suggest you to not write everyday because you have to, but to do it when you really have something worth. Or, as an alternative (which I usually do with clients, but considering to apply to my blog too), to start thinking in:

offering controlled guest post opportunities in your blog;

preparing with anticipation evergraen content (but not low quality one), that you can post with indipendence of the date of publication.

That way you can maintain a regular publication schedule and "feed" your readers and inbound marketing actions.

The older version of the article redirects here, but the cached version is still available at this point. It's worth a look to see how much richer, more valuable and better formatted today's advice is compared to the 2006 version.

Excellent post - its definitely a very tedious process and it does take forever. I'm probably using about 20% of those techniques promoting FoxMetrics at http://foxmetrics.com but it seems I do have a long way to go. The Moz Crowd is forever the best with these awesome posts.

I found guest posts really helpful as you stated including one way links but the key problem is; Dwelling in a market that already has great content, its hard to write unique content, you mostly see pretty much the same things but with different titles that are SEO optimized and sometimes different content but boils down to the same thing.

The king of all blockaids is schedule/time/resources, I believe all of these tips are known, however, executing them takes a lifetime or an army - therefore, what I truly need is a tool that does it or most of it in a clean way.

So much to digest! I am adding this to my Pinerest board so I can refer back to it time and again. I will patiencly await your next update, thanks! (five years is not that long...zzzzz) Hey, by the way SEOmoz looks like a really cool site.

SEOMoz has always helped me to improve my websites ranking by suggesting new tricks and strategies everytime. I liked this article too and the comparison of analytics data and the email signatures were good enough to understand links imporatance I am following these ways for My Web Design Blog http://sachinkalambe.com

I think you have created a great example today on how to increase not only new, but return blog traffic. Revisiting and updating outdated content and republishing it is a great way to get existing users to come back to your site. I wasnt around Moz in 2007 when the first version of this post was published. If I was and remembered that content It would have been one more reason for me to check this post out.

Post your blog on your hometown Patch, if you have one. Patch's Local Voices section is a free way for you to increase your local exposure. You have to follow the Patch guidelines (namely no overt solicitation of business, and the content should be of potential interest to readers...you can't be completely self serving!) Well written blogs can be linked back to your existing site to help drive more traffic to your site.

One local blogger reported hundreds of more eyeballs on her page after her first three posts (over a two week period) and dozens more subscribers. It definitely can help draw attention to your business, especially if you are going for a local market.

If you aren't sure if you have a Patch near you, visit patch.com to find out. It is free to post and you retain the rights to your contact. A true win-win if you ask me!

Excellent article, I clicked onto it looking for info on Flickr's impacts on SEO. I use their Creative Commons search tool all of the time to look for images for posts, but I was hesitant to open my own photos up for public use. Knowing now that there is a way to search to find photos that were not linked reassures me somewhat, and it seems the added exposure is worth the risk of some going uncredited. Thanks for this, and all of the other useful info!

Adding authoriship to blogs is crucial. I did this a few months ago and am starting to see my smiling mug shot in googles results now. Fun for bragging and for more clickthroughs too. I appreciate this list, there is always something more to learn and implement.

Post Panda, Authorship announcements and Google + Your World this post has never had more value. Leave it unread at your peril!There's a piece to add around using more tools to find the very best authorities for that content through outreach (and use of form letters as in Mike Kings Moz post from last year to improve conversion and uptake) but its pretty exhaustive and brilliantly captured. Thanks Rand.

Great write up for both the beginner blogger to advanced blogger. 21 great points that often are over looked or not focused upon when blogging. I often use the following line when meeting asking if SEO is important "What good is a website if no one visits?" The same could be said about a blog post. "What good is a blog post if it does not receive any views?"

WOW . . Great job Rand, these all can help anyone bloggers to maximize their blog traffic. But blogging needs time and unque interesting writing to create compelling content for the users to get excited about your shared stuff!

I like #15. It's great to keep writing and publishing content, but it's vital you get out there and meet people, spread the word about what you're doing. People like people, not just blog posts. It also provides a great opportunity to bounce ideas off people and get feedback face-to-face, rather than replying on comments or emails that can often be misinterpreted.

PS. How come so many people leave a comment despite not even reading the whole post? Come on bloggers, we need readers not just writers!

I have been working on building my blog for 3 years now and since I have decent readerhsip now, I am thinking of inviting guest posts. However, I have been wary of duplicate content as I think most guest bloggers will try to reuse the content they write on other sites too as it is a time consuming task. How big of a problem this really is? Should I worry about it? It will be good to hear from others.

Love the great article and I've used a variety of these methods to gain traffic to my websites. Many of them definitely work, although everyone will not have the same type of success. One place I like to use to amass traffic to my website is http://increasetraffic.co, because they send actual real visitors to your site cheaply. I think you get like 10,000 visits a month for 10 bucks, which is like a happy meal and a few cup cakes these days. I have been following your blog for sometime and I most certainly will keep this information bookmarked. I have been reading this blog for so long I figured it was actually time to let you know I exist and leave a comment... lol

Great advice, especially Bonus#22. This is my second time at creating a blog. I am definitely going to stick with it, even though I have some friends who think that it is a waste of time having a blog. I know that it takes time for blogs to grow and acquire great traffic, but I'm sticking with it this time and definitely using some of the advice above. Thanks.

I noticed you wrote that people could feel free to re-post the content with a mention or link. I recently had a large directory type website take a dozen or so pages of content from my website and put it on a dozen or so pages on their website (along with content from other businesses) with a mention of my business (but not a link back to the pages that the content came from). On one hand it is good in that it promotes my business on a very high traffic website, and there is a page on their website that has a link to my website (that was already there as a paid listing before the content was posted by them), but I am concerned about duplicate content. Will this hurt my search engine ranking for the content on those pages? I have been working very hard to get good search engine ranking, and some of those pages on my website are on the first page of Google for the relevant keywords, others are not.Thanks in advance for any info you can give me on this.

Indeed, You shared the tremendous information about blog traffic but sometime we applied all techniques therefore, traffic doesn't drive in blog so, what are problems behind that if traffic doesn't come inside blog?

I just found a new website similar to twiends, but you can also get retweets and build your twitter network based on your geographic location, industry, and interests. Everything is based on Klout score, so you are getting followers and getting retweeted by people with high klout scores and strong social authority. This has been a free tool I have been using for my clients for the last week or so. I hope that helps. Brandon

Wetweet doesn't work for me, also - a bunch of similar alternatives simply don't work. What's up with that? There are so many of them and they just don't work. For now I'm using http://socialacorn.com/ - it's doing all sorts of tricks for me, but it's not very popular. Any similar sites?

Hey Rand another amazing post. We have developed and grown our blog a ton since we started on here a few months back and it's growing rapidly. This post has a ton of info. Looking forward to implementing a few of the points listed! Thx.

Hello Guys, It's a great post for us bloggers...Learnt a few must do things for being successful in the blogging world.I am interested in helping people maintain good health and thus choose the two niches that I am currently working on...

I am currently running two blogs; www.fitnfine.in and www.cookingmantra.com. I am working hard on the sites and in a period of past 5 months, I have built the blogs from ground up...before that I never knew a single thing about how websites function and the blogging technology including Wordpress. So this was completely new and challenging. I have come to this point so far and now need your help in establishing some good traffic to the sites. Please take a minute and have a look on the sites and please let me know what I am missing and what potential improvements are due. I have one more team member with me who looks at the content of the blogs while I take care of setting things up and the technical stuff... I have a few connections in the blogging world and thus not much direct guidance from those who have succeeded before me...I would appreciate any kind of help that you can offer to make the sites stand out and earn reputation...You can also reach me directly at ishehzan@gmail.com or reply in this comment thread...I'll be waiting for some beautiful and helpful replies. Thanks! a lot. :)

Wow! This is such a high value post on incresing blog traffic that I've been searching for. By the way, I am still in the process of building up my traffic and attracting my followers that could be from either the internet marketing, pickup arts or even personal growth niches.

Any tip on how I should best go about finding the right direction when searching for the right followers stretched among three different niches.

I'm sold. I'll be checking into your site more often. Its great to see that there are so many more things that I can do in order to attract more viewers. I have experimented with Reddit for my site for about a month and I believe that it has been a great success so far. After most of my posts, I have seen a small increase in the number of direct visits that I get. Nothing great but its progress.

this information is very good and very helpful. this is similar to what we are trying to do at http://increasetraffictomyblog.com and on http://jwcey.com where we are building free blogs for motivated bloggers... wow, keep up the good work fellas

This is a fantastic post, which I've referred back to over and over. It's perfect to share with both newbies and seasoned bloggers alike, to help them understand how to get the most from their blogging efforts.It introduces and gives an overview of so many key concepts and techniques, opening the door for further research and learning about how to use and apply them.Nice job!

Interesting tips for increase blog traffic, i have a blog pr2 and i want to grow in my business with my website, thanks for share this valuable information, and congratulations for your blog and product all are awesome

"Remember that everyone has a few posts that suck, and it's only by
writing and publishing those sucky posts that you get into the habit
necessary to eventually transform your blog into something remarkable."

That right there is hands down the best advice I've read here. Really, I have given up on other websites right before a huge surge and had stopped writing / building links and suffered a momentum drop because of it. So true.

Rand, you said that seomoz wasn't a success for about 2 years. What were the ups and downs of getting to that point where you could sit back and watch what you built turn into your definition of a success? What were your traffic numbers like at first?

As a Social Media Manager all these tips and tips are great help to improve the presence of one of the blogs/sites I work for. Managing differents blogs can be hard but it takes great organizational skills and knowledge. My main focus is GuySpy the newest way to interact with men in your area. Apart from being a gay dating app, GuySpy's platform is innovative and allows you to use great features. Take a look at their blog and download the app. http://guyspy.com

Replying to comments is best way to increase traffic. Everyone thinks replying is waste of time. But its wrong. Some readers comment on your posts. indirectly they help to increase your SERP results. they may contain some keywords which helps to show your result in Google

Thanks a lot for the tactis, especially for #22. Desperate in growing my blog which I have been writing for 1.5 years and still have less than 4,000 uniques monthly, I was looking for "traffic increase tips" and found your post. Frankly, I was thinking to give up and not "waste" my time for the blog any more... I was thinking, may be there is not enough audience in my niche, or may be the topics or my articles are not compelling enough... Now I know - I should be patient and not give up. Thanks a lot!

Very much agreed on the final point. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've wanted to give up on my blogs. (I actually have, a couple times. Rough business, this.) All the SEO in the world won't do you any good if you aren't willing to stick it out through the initial rough patches.Good article, good advice. Keep on writing.

I truly enjoyed reading this article. What I got most out of it is that persistance is the key along with good content. Pushing in all directions is also a must. Persistant pushing will break through walls that seem impossible to get over. Thanks again for a great read!

I really enjoyed this post! It was informative, well detailed
and I didn’t get the sudden urge to off myself which is what I usually feel when
I read anything involving business. That
being said, turning my blog into a lucrative endeavor seems so overwhelming. I’m
new to all this and I’m wondering which is best to concentrate on at first? Or
is it ideal to do all these suggestions all at once? I hope you’ll say no to
the second question ;).

Amazing Post and Great knowledge share.... i read the entire content and hopefully will implement these strategies fully on my blog :) To kick of with one of the trick that you mentioned about sharing and posting about your blog So here it goes :) My Blog url is www.arealmirage.blogspot.com Guys please visit it and share your suggestions on the blog that I have created.Thanks Happy Blogging :)

I had just launched my mobile app product online last May 27 and had a few downloads. I created social media accounts for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youtube (for the video demos), and blogspot (I haven't created Wordpress and don't have my own domain for the product yet but I am planning to have them in the future). After a while the downloads ceased. I post content on my blogspot and researched a bit on using tools like hootsuite, twitterfeed so that I can somehow automate spreading my posts on my blog to my social media contents. I have received a few followers in Twitter. I am moving on to making Screencast now instead of recording my smartphone itself while doing video demos. My blogspot stats show some views probably I had 20 views for a few days on the recent content I made. My app's free version received a few more downloads for a few days.After my little journey on marketing my app (I really don't have any marketing skills since I am a software developer but I have always been fascinated and interested in doing marketing) I realized after reading this post that my efforst and the little journey I had is very little and just the beginning. The detailed approach of this blog really made me realize and opened my eyes to the things I still need to do to succeed in my marketing efforts. This blog made me inspired again to continue my marketing efforts. It was put up in such a detailed yet catchy and interesting way that gave me new zest in doing my marketing after an initial so-so results of my efforts. I realized there is so much more effort I have to give to marketing my product but this blog post gave me a very clear path and direction to take on my marketing journey. Thank you very much for this wonderful post. I salute you and you will always be an inspiration to me in my marketing journey.

I just read half of this post and noticed that I have previously implemented several of these suggestions into my website. However, I am such a beginner on this topic that I have a question and hope somebody can help me out with it. The theme I uploaded to my wordpress blog has a link already installed in it for the 'RSS FEED.' From what I understand, the 'RSS FEED' is basically a way for visitors to subscribe to receive any updates posted to your website. How do I know if it is set up properly or not?

Also, I find this post to be MORE than helpful! You definitely did a terrific job on it and I love all of the details you added. Every other blog I tend to read on this subject is much too generalized.

Thanks for the great work and in advance for any help.

If anybody can help me to better understand the 'RSS FEED' topic, please e-mail me at centsmakingsense@gmail.com. I will respond back promptly to any suggestions.

The fact that I am having heart palpitations as I am reading this shows that I have a lot to learn. I have the content and the passion, but I feel like I am trying to teach myself a whole new field of study here! Thanks so much for this helpful guide. I am bookmarking this & will go through step by step as I build my blog (probably over the next 2 years!). Hopefully by then this won't feel like a foreign language to me.

great post, can you please check my website www.budgetmart.co.za and tell me what is wrong with my website. I am not getting enough traffic. i used to get 100 visitors now all of sudden they have dropped to 10.

I love your post. Great content. I love the keyword search point. The only thing is I'm not a huge fan of reddit as a means of generating traffic to a blog. They do not like self promotion. Even if you create a balance of your stuff and other peoples.

This is GREAT stuff. So far my biggest challenge has been using analytics to effectively track blog traffic and comments. Got to find out where they're coming from. I'm pretty much using this as a step-by-step to help promote a blog I'm running for a client. Thanks!

2. Making the content entertaining – including funny videos, pictures, illustrations, jokes etc. The web site should seem to be made for entertainment.

3. Visual aids.

4. Videos.

5. Favicons used as a logo

6. Posting information in social web sites like Yahoo answers, Facebook forums etc. or other websites related to yours.

7. Techniques of contrast, perspective and colors for the design appropriate to the meaning of the subjects. You do not have to be an artist in order to be able to use their effects in general. Contrasts create a realistic impression and any perspective promises a future. Hot colours from red to yellow are attractive and giving a welcome to the visitors, but also give an impression of restlessness. Green is “the perfect” color – it expresses positive emotions like stillness, hope… Opposite colors like yellow and purple, green and red or blue and orange give meaning of difference. When colors are similar (like yellow, orange, pink, red) they give meaning of diversity. These three general techniques of contrast, perspective and colours can combine in many different ways in order to correspond to the texts. The combination between these techniques and the meaning creates a strong harmony.

8. “Frequently asked questions” section.

9. “Contact us” section.

Web sites for traffic generation like the mentioned above could help much more, but these tips are the first steps. Web sites for traffic generation which offer diferent ways are better than these that offer one way to earn visitors.

Thank you so much for such a great post. Blogging and general web-site building is just a hobby for me but once in a while I have managed to create a site that really seems to drive the visitors. I have been mainly relied on keywords, social media and links.

Not onloy do you have some excellent ideas, and great links to further reading, but you also have a really natural writing style that is easy to read and engages the reader. That is, in itself, an excellent way of growing visitors!

Those tips actually do work. But people still need to know how crucial paid advertising is, or free blogging privileges on sites like seomoz and increasetraffictomyblog.com. Let’s face it, the internet is wrapped up and even with the best seo, you have to spend money or write high quality content. It is what it is.

Thanks for taking out your time in writing a very comprehensive guide for blogger, am new to the whole thing, and am about to quit, because the stat is not just encouraging (I would stop looking at it for a while), this post is not just inspirational, it's motivational too. You gave me insights into how the whole thing works, and also a reason not to quite. I'll just keep upping my game and hopefully mine won't take two years before getting there. Thanks again.

After 2.5 years of consistent (quality content) blogging, and barely any traffic, I am about to call it a day... but I am going to follow these tips for the next 4 months and see if I get a marked increase in my traffic.

I appreciate the well thought out tips, but I especially like the fact the many of them do not require you to have an insanely large social media following to follow-through. There is nothing more irritating than seeing non-stop Catch-22s that require you to have a large audience in order to get your content seen.

Great article. Must admit sticking with it always turns out for the better. So many companies come to me for help and the biggest problem they face is that they give up a month before they're about to take off!

thanks very much for explain to improve traffic blog, but im still not understand how to do for step by step above, my site verval nrg padamu negeri, please tell me whats about my site, a site guide for help.

Really glad I read this post. I've got a habit of throwing in the towel when things don't kick off straight away, personal habit of mine, but this post has inspired me to stick at it, write about what I love, and hopefully the hard work will pay off :)

Hi Rand, this post is one of the most complete I have found on how to get more traffic on your blog, it seems to cover everything. Thanks for sharing it. I will share it very soon in a new article I'm creating for a blog. Thanks again. [link removed]

hi, I like your this blog very much. But few years ago when i was fighting to published my blog I contacted Mr. Manoj of .net who gave me some relevent ideas like you discussed. I appreciate your writeing style also great work...

Bookmarked! Thanks for the links to the relevant google tools :) I always have trouble trying to find them.

The graph is also an encouragement to all bloggers out there, don't give up. I experienced a spike with a successful post recently, and it revived my interest for blogging once again. Just need a "big break"!

Hi there! Please keep your comments (and the links in them) relevant to what the author talked about. This isn't the right place to promote your own site in a way that doesn't add value to the post. Thanks! =)

Content is King, and a well structured website with easy to find information is key to building a great website, although it helps to use Google Adwords, I have also been using www.boostasite.com to increase my traffic, it is free and many of your readers may like it!

Just like #9 and #13. There is a site called BeaconWatch: http://www.beaconwatch.com/ Here you can submit answers to questions that no one has asked. That means you can provide solutions to problems of your choice, so you can write about really anything and if people like your content they will follow to your blog which is shown along with your answers

Thanks for the excellent post. I've been building my blog over the past year and a half and it's steadily improved. Lately it's been tuning things up one step at a time by reading comprehensive posts like this one (I do think this is the most comprehensive I've seen though) that have helped me plant more seeds for success. A ton of great tips, ESPECIALLY the last one. I think it's easy for bloggers to either give up or slow down on their content, and that's what calcifies things more than anything else. Thanks again for the info and motivation!James Moore

I actually co-wrote an article on running a web business and how difficult it is, considering your point about 'Not Giving Up' this may be handy for a few folks - http://meebal.com/the-truth-behind-running-a-web-business/

This is a fantastic post which will help any website out with their traffic. In fact, I was given some motivation to put together a simple version of this article for my personal brand. Maybe check it out?http://mediainfiltration.com/2013/02/25/10-tips-to-generate-more-traffic/Regards,Steven Johnson - President & Founder of Media Infiltration

I love #22. Sometimes SEO companies say once you start blogging you will get all this traffic and grow your rankings, and with expectations like that it's hard after 8 months or so to keep blogging with minimal results. But I went back to SEOmoz's first posts and sure enough there were only 1 or 2 pageviews... Now look at this post alone with over 3000 tweets and hundreds of likes, comments and thumbs ups!

Fantastic post! So much to learn from and refer back to here. I recently wrote a post about what to do with each post as you publish it (http://www.nathanbweller.com/increase-blog-traffic/) but this post is excellent in that it's more about general blog development. Bookmarked.

brilliant read lots for me to think about, hard to break through in New Zealand almost as many food bloggers now as there are people in the country! As per your last point though, it's a case of just keeping going

hi i would like to add one more point over here :- Getting involved in forums and comment sections is a good way of making online friends. You may then have them look at your blog and maybe even link to it. If you are lucky, then they may spread the word via social media too, thereby increasing your traffic numbers.

this is exactly what we do at http://www.bloodpressuremagazine.com/ and it works. It just a small normal blood pressure magazine where we accept guest posts, answers to emails and comments, and it allow us you get lot of social activity on blood pressure site.

I have been to my favorite libraries (Amazon and Barnes and Noble) to get books on blogging and how to get my business blog noticed (a frustrating chore!). Your article has told me so much more than the several books I have read.

I just redid my site in Joomla and no one is finding my blog http://webscapedevelopers.com/blog

Great post! Thanks for sharing this. I just started my travel blog and getting into SEO now. It's a really interesting area of expertise. I like the way you describe the different tactics in your post. I will certainly apply a lot of them. I signed up and I will keep following your website! Cheers Bastiaan

Real ideas that I will definitely incorporate on my home page! It's funny how common sense this sounds once you wrote about it! Thanks for sharing! But hey! I have a tool that will definitely help you in tracking traffics and stuffs, very useful tool indeed! you can try the tool at

http://colibritool.com/ or directly use the tool here http://colibritool.com/seo-software .

Thanks for putting all of this information together! This is the best information I have been able to find online about driving traffic to your site! Excellent work! I will definitely implement your recommendations.

This is the best post for reading about increasing your traffic, and that's why its at the top of Google.Let's look at a few simple reasons why the content is getting it to the top.l
It has a great title, with a
number displayed prominently. You find a lot of trash when you're looking around on the internet, and a large number tends to attract traffic. You know you'll get a lot of key points, in this case 21 of them, and you can work your own content around those key points.

l
All 21 points are formatted
well, and each contains a wonderful graphic.
They range from large graphs to actual website screenshots. These are great for those visual learners out there, and it makes scanning the content easy and fast.

l
Analytics are shown and
discussed, with arrows pointing to what’s being talked about. Again, this makes things so much simpler.

l
The article is on one page, not
21 pages that I have to click through.
By doing that you might be getting more page views, and perhaps more
advertising opportunities. I think it’s
a bad tactic, however. I hate waiting to
transfer between all of those pages, and I’ll usually go somewhere else pretty
quickly, unless the content is good.
Remember, if you’ve got great content, you can do just about anything.

l
There’s a huge comment section
on this page, and you can learn a lot by just reading those. Don't forget that you can learn so much from quality comments. And don't forget that by leaving a quality comment, you can direct traffic back to your own site.

Great post randfish. I am really new to blogging, as in literally a baby. I created my blog 3 weeks ago! I am not looking to make any money from blogging. All I want is to express myself and write and share thoughts and opinions with like minded people by commenting on modern life and the odd movie review. But the crazy world of social media and the blogosphere is just mind blowing! Your tips, however, are really useful and a great reference for me.

I have to say though, that (like the comment above) my favourite one was #22. Just when my brain was a little frazzled, seeing (and I mean actually visually seeing) your wife's success with her Everywhereist blog is so encouraging! If you've got something to say all you want is for people to hear it and join in the conversation and there's so many of us out there waiting to connect. It's really inspiring.

I just got done reading this article and this can be so useful for most new businesses wanting to learn how to improve their Google rankings. This gives a clear conception on SEO. If you're among the quarter of people who don't know what SEO is or understand how it can help you, you should really read this article!

Great Job with the post Rand. I love points #2 and #22. Also, I think #10 will be especially useful for people who have a tough time finding guest blogs.

Sharing and re-posting of posts is a great way to share word about a good post and giving people an option to use liscensed images and getting links back from them is an excellent way to increase and diversify any link profile.

Thanks for the useful post Rand. We will definitely be using quite a few of these ideas!

Great article. I just updated my email signatue ;-) In addition to the 22 tips I would suggest to keep an eye on usability and UX. This helps to keep your new visitors and convert them to loyal readers! Use tools like http://clickmap.ch/en/ to optimize your blog (or webpage).

Hello; when I started reading this post, i fully expected to be horrified by how poorly i was doing. I was pleasantly surprised that I was already following many of your suggestions. The section on guest blogging was helpful as well as inspiring. It gave me something new to focus on. Many of the links mentioned will make following the suggestions much easier. And I'm most thankful for you reminding us not to give up. I have many good friends in my life who do that for me, but you can't imagine how much that bit of encouragement will help keep someone taking that next step until their blog catches on. thanks again, max

You provide some really great, detailed information here. We agree that sharing your posts are one of the best ways to make connections. Its also one of the best ways of getting your voice out there. Within small businesses especially, the use of sharing infromation is useful. All the aspects you have covered is essential information for any business in general. Thanks for posting this!

I especially love #10 & #22 ...We have found excellent results from Guest Blogging and referencing back to old post of ours... The NEVER GIVE UP & Be Consistent, can be challenging at times, but has paid off big for us now and in the past. Though definitely was a hard lesson learned back in the day.

A major point that is the one on do not give up. Many months can go by with little increase in readership and then all of a sudden there is a surge. Have not tried the guest blogging yet but may soon do so

About Tip #6: Google now has the reverse image search feature at their image search pages (https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi) this makes an amazing tool to search for sites that uses your image but are not giving backlink to your site. So, Creative Commons images with Attribution Copyright can actually be the new trend in Link Building.

Thanks Rand. I finally got the chance to read through this post last night and this morning. We will certainly be adopting most of the tips you have covered. I'm especially excited about utilising Reddit. We have some great posts in our blog but we are still in the early stages of building up a following through Twitter and Facebook so we don't get many views. I think Reddit could definately help increase traffic numbers. Fingers crossed

Excellent post. All the points mentioned are very important but I feel, the type of content is the most important. All other depends on what you write or how you write. So quality of content / style of representing is also very crucial to attract traffic. A well researched, unique and informative article is a must to start with these 22 points. Thank you for coming up with such brilliant article.

Thank you Rand, this is certainly one of the most valuable posts. I have stopped blogging for few months due to some platform and traffic issues, and your article just appeared before me... . Great tips from beginning till end. Lots of suggestions for me to start blogging once again.

It's likely why you saved it for last, but that last one is the toughest tip to apply. :P

I've been crankin' away at my blog for over a year now and it still hasn't taken off like I'd like it to. I love blogging about SEO/SMM, so I'm not going to be giving up on it anytime soon, but it still makes it hard to produce consistently.

All great tips, especially integrating SEO and keyword research into each post. In order for a post to be valuable and generate traffic long term it needs to be optimized. This includes the title, body content, and a customized URL that includes keywords. This will continue to drive traffic to the blog into the future, and beyond a few days when it is heavily promoted.

Excellent post Rand - I am starting my own blog in the next couple of weeks - just creating it at the moment and I will be following the advice in this article closely. Best lesson I have taken from it is stick at it and you will get there in the end - perseverance is key! Thanks :)

Wow! This article is totally awesome. I appreciate the time and the efforts of SEOMOZ. I am new to SEO and I open to learn everything I can to make me a SEO guru. If you have any more suggestions, please send me something tjacquet@applecapitalgorup.com

Missed this back in 2007 when it was first published, thanks for updating it, Rand!

To add to the tips for leveraging social to drive traffic, I've found Topsy and Twiends to be very valuable in finding brand interactions, conversations within your niche, and potential outreach prospects. Well worth a look if you are finding yourself frustrated at trying to get all you need out of manual searches.

I have noticed that we get some incredible traffic for series of blog posts and the posts which answer really specific questions. I know this wasn't about content planning but honesty believe that making a schedule and focusing in on a topic of the month is a great way to break budding bloggers into the habit of posting regularly with focussed material.

I also really like Mike's tip above about voicing concerns over shared problems your industry has.

Great post by a Wizard of Moz...It is really awesome to see this kind of phenomenal and Rand have just written the tweet about this exhaustive post. This will ended up with the best post for all bloggers including me.

21 steps are crucial and all points are need to execute for getting the better performance for our blogs. I like the bonus point and it is crtical for sure because at the intial level some bloggers are might be frustrated and they give up but as Rand says if you steady & focusing on your blogs then definitely no one can stops you. I just learning so much from this Mozers community and thanks for the lovely post Rand...:)

You can search by topic on Klout.com and sort by content / influential user. From that you can create lists of the influential users (in Klout). Then when you need to distribute a piece of high quality link bait and get it in front of your content distributor you open the list, ctrl click down all the twitter/fb accounts (to open in new tabs), then send a personal message to each individual with your content.

Make sure your content is worth sharing and that you're actually phrasing it in terms that are useful for their followers/fans. (otherwise you're goign to come off ungeniune and spammy) In all fairness to, you'd want to develop relationships with the most influential rainmakers, ask them up front if there is anything you can do to help them out. Most of the time just asking is enough to impress them and develop a good rapport.

Great post! I'm starting a blog soon so this is perfect timing. I've read several other articles regarding success in blogging and I have to say that many of them repeat themselves. I find that this article has the highest number of unique ideas that I've seen.

Timely article as am working on releasing my personal blog very soon. I think the tip on guest posting is very important as it opens so many new doors in terms of building good relationships online. Keep it up!

Nice....Very valuable points, epically point 22 about consistency. Many give up, not just bloggers, but even in business due to not seeing ROI straight away. If they ride the storm, they will get to the other side and start to get some real momentum going within their blogs and business.

Fantastic post and, itself, a great representation of #8. You've linked off to so much supporting 3rd party content I could easily spend an entire day bouncing back-and-forth between this post and the ones you've l inked to.

I run a travel blog myself and since I put a lot of effort into enticing photography I get decent traffic via Google Images and Flickr. So far so good.

But sometimes a good photograph (with good referral traffic) gets copied by some other site and suddenly the traffic from Google Images for that particular photograph goes to the other site instead of my blog. The traffic gets hijacked!

Google sometimes seems to give other sites more value for a given search term than the original photographer's page. That seems unfair.

I posted the photograph and the according traffic chart on my blog travelmemo.com. With Google Plus Your World things seem to slightly have improved, but some spammy hotel page still gets the bulk of my photograph's traffic. Microsoft's Bing is still linking to my own photograph.

I feel that Google Images has some homework to do regarding images SEO.

One tip for getting guest post published on your site that has worked well for me is to find similar blogs in your niche that have published guest posts and ask those authors if they would be interested in writing a guest post for you. Usually they are very receptive to this because they have been looking for guest post opportunities.

I was googling around tonight and happened upon this great blog post. I appreciate the wealth of invaluable, understandable, and great methods to apply to improving ones blog or website provided within this post. I started working on several different website/blog ventures about six months ago. At times it can be very discouraging and overwhelming. I have even felt like folding up shop and burning the tent. I had read all 21 points, the thoughts and ideas were bouncing around in my head like the basketballs during tonights March Madness games. I reached the overtime bonus round with point 22 and smiled. Thanks for the great tips and the encouragement to keep pressing forward!

Excellent post- a lot of very good tips which will definitely be referred back to as we start to develop our company blog and for my own personal blog too. Think you hit the nail on the head too by saying 'never give up' - it is a long process but evidently it pays off in the end!

Great words and excellent read (skimming will give you an idea also). My favorite: "Participate in the Communities Where Your Audience Already Gathers". Also I found that adding infographics or meaningful images that tell a story increased our blog traffic by 30%

I was very high on the MyBlogGuest idea when I first started with them, but ultimately I found it was not as effective as working directly with trustworthy blogs.

The biggest issues I have run into at MyBlogGuest have been articles not getting published at all, or being greatly altered by an unscrupulous publisher. It's a real headache to have 10-15 bids on an article, accept one, and then wait 1-2 weeks only to find that the publisher never followed through. Then you have to start over and begin accepting bids again.

Last week I received an alert at MBG that one of my articles had been altered. I checked into it and found that the publisher added a ton of links to the article, all going to his own websites. That destroys the value of my one link, and it makes the article (with my name on it) look incredibly spammy. Now there is a poor looking article on the web which mentions my company - not what I intended.

Finding good blogs to work with requires a lot of leg work at the beginning, but once you find them it is quite easy thereafter. MyBlogGuest really didn't add value for me like I had expected. I think you are better off working directly with high quality blogs that pass solid link value and are trustworthy.

The best value of MyBlogGuest might be in finding a few new publishers to work with, and then working with them directly.

I really enjoyed reading this article, i just started up my own blog and was searching for tips on how to get the traffic flowing, this post certainly was among the best i have reaed in the last few days, thanks a lot for sharing!

Feeling so cool after reading this and specially after seeing your that anylystic visitor graph really if we work hard surelly one day we will get sucess.. hope to do work on my blog by ur above gudiance.

Thanks for all the traffic generation tips. I'm going to try implementing a few here and there until the list is complete. I especially liked the bit on guest blogging and I think that shall be a good place to start. Will let you know how it works.

Is it better to write long posts (Like this one) for better SEO? Sometimes, the length of the article might be a deterant, and people won't read it.

I've created a very simple guide to SEO, which takes minimal attention span, but is not as in depth as this post. Check it out here: http://blog.blainelight.com/2012/02/how-to-enhance-your-websites-seo-to-get.html

Great post, thank you so much for the information! Finding good topics to write about and even writing compelling blog posts are not the end of the line as I thought they would be; so I was left wondering where the hordes of readers were. The time you took to address the many different ideas on how to increase traffic not only give me some great ideas but leave me with inspiration that simply writing the blog post isn't enough. Thank you for your efforts and what a great read and resource.

Got through reading this last night!!! Great post and very Helpful! i Just recently started my website Guidegamers.com but have been having trouble even getting 1 or 2 occasional visitors. This post has opened my eyes to to the work I must do in order to promote my site and not Spam the world with advertising. Thank you so much for sharing this knowledge!

Great post Moz. I really enjoyed reading your 21 tips and the 22nd is the one that really hit home. You are right about the importance of consistency. Blogs, like any other business or venture, take time to get going. I've had my ups and downs with my blog but am in it for the long haul. So thanks for reminding us to be persistant! The first 21 tips did have a lot of good information and I will continue to work on those techniques as well. Best of luck!

Great Post randfish! - There are many other ways on how to generate traffic to your blog. Here is a list of ideas on how you can start to gain unique visitors. http://ajsolutions.us/ajnetwork/how-to-generate-traffic-to-your-blog/

I have been working on my blog on and off since 2007 i believe. I just recently got seriouse... I hope tip # 22 is true. I keep trying I am not sure what is really working or not but I am going to follow these tips and see.

I had to register and leave a comment here because your article really helped me. I am a beginner blogger and you have really motivated me to go on. However discouraged I might be I'll keep in mind your tips :). Kisses and hugs :).

Thanks so much for writing all this out. Imost certainly will be sharing this to all my email lists. It takes time and dedication to get a good following and I think the best part of this post was the example of Everywhereisit's Google Analytics. This particular example is "classic blogging 101."

Hey i want to know Sharing new blog or new blog posts on diffrernt social media and bookmarking sites is good or bad. Bad means is it considered spamming according to google algorithms..? i started a new blog and i am working hard. I want to share blog posts on Google+ profile and page, facebook profile and page, Chime, Reddit, Digg, and all of the Top social sites, but i just want to know is it good for serps boost ups. I read that Sharing on diffrent sites will increase the indexing time of new blog posts. But i am still worried and want to know is it good or bad according to search engines to get a lot of link back to our sites through lot of diffrent social networking sites.

Hi their, Mr.Expert. A Detailed and very informative post. I am new to blogging so I have loving and hating relationship with it all day long. Just trying to stick with last piece of advice that you shared but its not that easy for a beginner to write something and then just keep waiting for readers, so will be benefiting from your words.

I have been to HubPages recently and loved the way whole community help each other let everyone to grow, are their more platforms like HubPages where there is strong sense of community?

Thanks, very much for a Great post. It is so informative. I will be implementing your suggestions right away. George Katsoudas emaile the link for it and I will be sure to thank hime as well. Really excellent...

i just looked over this real fast and so far it looks like a lot of good information. I'm going to read over it more when i get a minute. i've already seen a few things i'd like to try on my site. Thanks for the info!

Thanks Rand for this wonderful post, full of ideas. This will not only benefit webmasters like me but also help website and blog owners if these things are applied correctly... As many times I have seen that people read and apply without understanding the entire concept behind each thing...

Very good ideas for someone starting off their blog, and it always the best to stick with it for one year or more as it takes a lot of time to get traffic. I'm gonna incorporate all this for my website http://www.biotechpicklist.com/ thanks for the advice it will help!

Great ideas! Lots of great content!I have been blogging for a few months. I get visitors daily. I could always use more traffic.Do you allow guest blogs here?Do you want to post on my viral blogging platform?Keep up the great content. I will give you some link juice!Talk soon.